Two dads reflect on how their lives shaped their families

By SARAH LEHR

slehr@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

When Brent Davis was stationed in Insurlik, Turkey, after the Gulf War, he experienced one of the worst scares a father can imagine.

Davis was living with his wife and baby daughter in base housing while on Air Force assignment to support a no-fly zone.

“There was a fuel pipeline that ran pretty much under our cul-de-sac, and there was a terrorist group that set a time bomb on it to detonate that would have certainly killed my wife and baby girl,” Davis remembered.

Fortunately, U.S. military personnel discovered the bomb and found that it wasn’t rigged properly to explode, Davis said.

“We’re a Christian family, and I just thank God for that protection [and] that it was wired incorrectly,” he said.

Despite that close call, Davis is grateful for his military experience. “I know that 27 years in the Air Force made me a better person,” he said.

And he believes that the Air Force made him a better father. Davis, who lives in Austintown and retired in November from a position as chief of public affairs for the 910th Airlift Wing of the Air Force Reserve, has two children – Lainne, 21, and Justin, 19.

“In the military, you really have to have a high degree of integrity because we’re being trusted by the taxpayers, the general public to carry out our mission, to have the training and expertise,” he said.

“As a father, it’s the same thing, you need to have a constant state of readiness.”

Davis took his first military job during the Cold War as a nuclear weapons specialist in North Dakota. Davis was just 20 and had top secret security clearance. Davis, who grew up on the west side of Cleveland, eventually moved to Youngstown with his family and transitioned to public affairs work in 1997, which he said offered his children a greater degree of stability.

“They didn’t have to experience moving every seven years,” he said. “They had that advantage.”

Nonetheless, the Davis family is adventurous and vacations across the globe. When Davis was deployed alone for his public affairs job, he’d bring stories home. He traveled to Mexico in 2010 after the Gulf oil spill and to Qatar in 2008 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He’s documented numerous humanitarian missions, including in the Dominican Republic where he followed donated clothing to its final recipients and in Guyana where a civil-engineering squadron built a schoolhouse from scratch.

Davis said this lifestyle has instilled a love of exploration in his children.

“It’s probably much better to travel and experience and go on adventures than to necessarily focus on accumulating material possessions,” Davis said. “The experiences far outweigh the things.”

Davis described his two children as opposites and said that parenting has been a constant state of learning. Lainne, who studies acting at Cleveland State University, is an artistic type, while Justin, who studies criminal justice at Kent State University, is meticulous and process-oriented, according to Davis.

“What worked for my daughter didn’t necessarily work for my son, and it was important that I have patience to try different things and figure out what works in raising them,” Davis said.

Lainne characterized her father as a big talker with even bigger gestures. She said she’s inherited his laid-back temperament. “I’ve always been messy and my mom would say, ‘She needs to clean her room’ and my dad would be like, ‘Oh well, she’s an artist, just let her be,’” Lainne remembered.

Davis’ wife, Sonya, who was a stay-at-home mother while her children were growing up, said she and her husband believe honesty is the best parenting strategy. “If our children asked us difficult questions, we’re the type of parents that would never sidestep the issue,” she said.

ANOTHER AUSTINTOWN DAD

Another local dad – Kevin Shelton of Austintown – said he learned his best parenting strategies from the martial arts. He vividly recalls the first times he stepped into a dojo.

“I walked into it, and there was this gorgeous blond who was a brown belt,” he said. “In fact, I was so impressed, I married her.”

Shelton and his wife, Mary, raised three children – William, 35; James, 34; and Katie, 30. Shelton also is the grandparent of four children ranging in age from 2 to 11.

Shelton, who has spent most of his life doing heating and air-conditioning service technician jobs and working as a martial-arts instructor on the side, thinks that most people misunderstand the martial arts.

“They think it’s just about beating someone up,” he said. In actuality, he said, it’s about discipline and trust. “Have the martial arts made me a better father? Absolutely,” he said.

“I learned patience, which was probably the most important thing when my kids were growing up.”

Shelton was particularly beloved at Summit Academy Secondary School in Youngstown, where he worked as a martial arts instructor, shop teacher and assistant football coach. Summit, a tuition-free, non-profit alternative school, specializes in students with ADHD and austim spectrum disorders. When Shelton first started working at Summit, he struggled and nearly quit, according to Ray Pallante, the school’s former principal.

“He said to me, ‘These kids lack discipline. They say things,”’ Pallante recalled. But, Shelton came back to Pallante’s office a few days later and announced that he was up to the job.

Shelton went on to work at Summit for eight years. He headed the school’s first martial arts demo team and used his skills he learned from working in heating and air conditioning to start a shop program.

“He asked to start that program because he told me a lot of these kids don’t have fathers. They didn’t learn how to fix things,” Pallante said.

Shelton often drove his students to football games and martial-arts events himself and missed fewer than three days of school over the eight years he worked at Summit. “He knew that a lot of these kids needed consistency because their families were struggling,” Pallante said. “And for a lot of these kids, school was their entire social life and where they got their meals.”

Kevin Shealey, assistant principal at Summit, said Shelton earned respect from his students because he always leveled with them. “Kids can spot a phony,” Shealy said. “You knew with Kevin that he was genuine.”

Shelton was the type of person to own up to his mistakes. Once, he lost his patience with a student, so he marched himself to the principal’s office, brought the student along and demanded to be written up for losing his temper.

“That kid learned from that because he was like, ‘Wow, that guy admitted he was wrong,’” Pallante said.

“I would always ask my students one question: ‘Are you a man?’” Shelton said. “And if they asked me the same thing, I would say, ‘Not yet, but I’m working on it.’”